


seasons.

by outpastthemoat



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Coda, Episode: s09e10 Road Trip, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-15
Updated: 2014-01-15
Packaged: 2018-01-05 20:05:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,840
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1098072
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/outpastthemoat/pseuds/outpastthemoat





	seasons.

You cover the body with a thin white sheet, yellowed with age and stinking of mothballs and of closets filled with dark secret things, and you wind it around those dead heavy limbs.  You try not to look at what your hands are doing, but you do: you blink and look down and see those soft black hairs on the arm you are folding across that still chest. Right where a heart would go. 

The hairs are burnt at the tips, and there is a fine black dust that crumbles when your fingers move over the flesh, black dust like soot that gets on your hands, your sleeves, under your nails.  You fall to your knees and touch your head to the floor and taste something in your mouth.  Something like sin, or guilt.  You don’t have a name for it. You kneel there for minutes, hours. You don’t know.

You burn the body.  Then you crawl into your room and lock the door and lie on the bed and shake.  You stare up at the ceiling and feel something cold and shivering under your skin.  You can’t stand it.  The air in your room smells of burnt flesh, of scorched hair, of blood and bone and decay.  Your skin smells of smoke.  Your shirt is covered in a fine gray ash.  You lie there for minutes, hours. You doesn’t know.  

You press your face into the pillow on your bed and say a name, over and over, but it’s not the name of the dead boy whose body you have left smoking among hot coals and charred wood; you call for him over and over and you pray he will hear.  You call for him until you are gasping for air, your lungs are empty, your heart is beating like a hummingbird’s in your ears.  

You slap a hand over your mouth.  You breathe through your fingers. Seconds, minutes: you can’t tell. Tears are hanging on the tips of your eyelashes. 

You take your phone out of your pocket and scroll down and press call.  He doesn’t answer.  You call and call and each time it goes to voicemail.  You say, Please.  Please. I need you, I need you, Cas, please.  You call for him for minutes, for hours.  You don’t know. He doesn’t answer.  

He shows up hours later, days later. You don’t know.  He walks in wearing a clean white shirt, a pair of shoes covered in mud and wet grass. He almost looks like himself, but not exactly; not quite the way you have remembered, but rather an approximation.  He isn’t wearing a tie.  He looks like a bad copy of himself.  You lift your head and focus for the first time in days, weeks: you don’t know.  

He takes you by the shoulder and leads you to your bed.  His hands are gentle, but firm.  Weeks ago, in your car, he reached out to touch your arm, but then pulled his hand away.  You sat there in the driver’s seat and stared at him: at his unwashed blue jeans and wrinkled shirt with the faint stains under the arms and the creases in the sleeves over his elbows where he has made a habit of rolling up his cuffs, and you wanted to know why he’d stopped.  It kept you up at nights, wondering.  You wonder if he’d thought you’d say No.  It’s better if you don’t.Now you wonder where that hesitation went.  You wonder if it burned away with his human skin.

You sit where he put you and you let him paint a film of blood on your windows, your walls, the posts of your bed and you don’t take your eyes off him, not once.  You don’t close your eyes, not even for a moment.  You keep him in your sight.  

He has dark lines under his eyes, he walks the way you have seen old men do, as if his bones are brittle at the core, as if each step forward is uncertain.  You look at him and think, for the first time since the angel walked away wearing your brother’s bones, He is being burned alive.  He is being destroyed from the inside out and all you can do is watch and wait, watch as the hours unfold and days go by and he burns down to an ember, burnt flesh and hollow bones, stinking of fire.  His eyes are rimmed with red, and you think, stupidly,  _He’s crying_.  But then you see the set of his shoulders, the steel in his spine and you know that no angel has ever cried, and it’s that moment that you realize that you have fallen in love with the man who would have, the man who might have wiped his tears on the edge of his sleeve, and in the moment after that it hits you that that man is gone.

You sit there and stare and you wonder how he had slept, as a human.  If he had slept on his side, a hand tucked under his cheek, under the pillow, if he had slept with his face pressed down into the mattress and his legs hanging off the side of the bed.  You will never know, now.  He stands by your window, silent and still except for his hands moving through the darkness, silhouetted in the thin gray light, tracing sigils on the cracked and peeling wood of your windowsill.

I missed out, you think.  You missed out on  _him_ , you know, and you know suddenly how a mother feels, returned after a long absence to find that she has missed her child’s first words, first steps, first smile.  These are moments you can never get back.  You missed out.  It’s on you.  Your fault you hadn’t been there to watch him, even if you couldn’t have done anything else for him except being there, a witness, someone for him to show things to.  He will never get to be that silly, sweet man again, Cas, who had learned how to talk with his face, learned to smile, learned to blush.  You had learned to like that man. You had learned to love that face.  

You would have liked to just stand back for a while and watch him work, do things, in his own time, in his own way.  However he wants to do it.  Folding laundry, filling grocery bags, pulling back the blinds of a ratty old motel room to catch the light.  Sometimes you think you could have stood in the middle of a room for hours, for days, for years, just watching him moving around you, picking up keys off a dresser top, throwing clothes on the floor, tying shoelaces.  

You close your eyes and time passes: hours, days, years. An eternity.  You can’t tell.  You open your eyes and turn your head and he is there, still standing, right in front of the window, by the foot of your bed.  You look at him and it feels like deja vu, it feels like something strange and familiar and old, something almost forgotten.  

He kneels beside you.  You think: I have read this story before.  You reach out and grasp the cuff of his sleeve and pull him close, tugging him into the space between your knees and you say, Help me, help me, please, Cas, help me.

What can I do? he asks.  

You want to say, You could hold me.  You could lie down beside me and put your arms around me, you could place your palm on my head and touch my hair until I fall asleep.  You might have able to ask this of him a week ago, a day ago. You are worn thin with grief, you have been stripped raw, and he is a witness to this, to your naked self.  There have been times, then and now, when all you have wanted was to stretch out your arms and pull him close to you, to let his warm human skin wrap around you, to soften your rough skin, to place his head on your chest and listen to your heart.  To fall asleep with his soft breaths echoing through the darkness, to discover the ways you might have fit together.  Not now. 

Don’t go, you say, Don’t go, please don’t leave me now, and he turns his head and looks at you, and there’s nothing human about the gesture at all.  So there’s nothing left of the man, after all, and you could count the ways you wish you could take him aside and put hands on his shoulders and tell him he doesn’t have to be anything but himself, that he is enough.  Enough for you. Enough for the world.  But it wouldn’t be true, and you have had enough of lies.  This not the man you want. This is the angel you need.  And yet you want him back, your traitor heart does not cry for the dead boy in the fire, it cries for the man you had just begun to think you might’ve fallen in love with, the months, the years, the future you might have had with him, Castiel the man, the one who closed his eyes and leaned on your car, the one who picked up your bar tab, the one who stuck his finger in his mouth after being picked by thorns.

I will be here, he says, and to you it sounds like a revelation, a moment of clarity: you have taken his world and shattered it into a pieces. There is a new and startling arrangement and order to his universe, a plane of existence he’d never known before.  This is the beginning of the rest of his life.  This is the end of the one he’d had. This is the last time he will look at you through rose-stained glass, with eyes with stars behind them.  You have broken your word. You have broken his world. You have destroyed the peace you had meant for him to find.

You look at him helplessly and say it all over again, Help me, help me: a dozen times, a hundred times. You don’t know.  He reaches out with fingers that shake so slightly you’d have missed it, if you hadn’t filled your eyes with every inch of him for days, months, years and years, and he touches your forehead.  His hand feels like a burning brand.

You close your eyes and he is the last thing you see, an angel with a bowed head and eyes cast to the floor, not meeting your own; not the man who might have been able to do nothing but hold you through your pain, but the angel who can grant you mercy, the one who should be able to offer you respite.  Maybe he can. Maybe he will. You don’t know.

 

 

> _tell me something, give me hope for the night_
> 
> _we don’t know how we feel_
> 
> _I will miss the days we had_


End file.
